In basements without ventilation (since voices tend to carry), the vinyl records were dependent on AC. Called SIGGRUV, these random noise disks were the most classified sensitive component of SIGSALY, despite advertising “groove” in the code name. As the code key, the records had to be playing at all times during vocoded conversations. “Records don’t play, they transmit,” says Lieutenant Donald E. Mehl. “These turntables were not for entertainment. They were the security for vital communications in a deadly war. Two turntables at the transmitting end and two turntables at the receiving end—so we could operate continuously. After twelve minutes, it would automatically switch over to the other turntable. When we started a turntable in Manila, it had to be synchronized with the one in Washington, DC—ten thousand miles away.”
SIGSALY Paris terminal, codenamed SAMPLE (Courtesy National Archives/NSA) (illustration credit 2.12)
Duplicate records, or “doubles,” had to be synchronized at each end of the conversation. Guarded with a collector’s zeal, these “one-time records” enjoyed but a twelve-minute life span. When talks dragged on in a Churchillian fashion, another record was cued to play backwards, its needle indexed at the center. The mix was automatic. “We had to be on point,” says Mehl. “If the needle jumped the groove, you hear garble because you no longer had the key in synchronization. When you’re out of synch, you just hear babble. We had to fix that.”
“Speak directly into the microphone in a normal voice.” SIGSALY user’s instruction card. (Courtesy NSA) (illustration credit 2.13)
Activated by crystal-controlled railroad clocks, the turntable motors remained synchronized despite time-zone hiccups and fading. A Westinghouse oven was retained at each SIGSALY terminal to keep the crystals stabilized. Bell Labs followed its own time standard, reportedly “several orders of magnitude better” than whatever ruled the rest of the world. The future was quantified to the millisecond, just so the record could stay on beat, randomly. For the recording of SIGGRUV, the Signal Corps hired the Muzak Corporation, located at 46th Street in Times Square. Randomized covert noise was a considerable leap for a company that transmitted crooners and waltzes over phone lines. Intended for depressed office geraniums, Muzak was invented by George Owen Squier, a Signal Corps officer who spent World War I designing remote-control mine detonators. The company’s deceptive lull of a motto—“Muzak fills the deadly silences”—in a sense abided by SIGSALY’s strict policy of constant noise, though instead of Guy Lombardo, it was a concentration of millions of panicked electrons banging around inside fourteen-inch glass vacuum tubes. Ralph Miller says the records sounded like “TV noise,” a thing of snow-blind reception. Disruptive yet no less disturbing than Muzak, SIGGRUV seemed to skip the dentist’s waiting room and get right to the ultrasonic drilling, the “shhh” of unvoiced fricatives.
“They kept Muzak tied up all during the war making records of these random signals,” says Miller. More than 1,500 gold-splattered records were initially pressed and duplicated for synchronization on both ends of the conversation. Each record was one-sided as a safeguard against B-side confusion and assigned CB-trucker code names like Red Strawberry, Wild Dog and Circus Clown. As the war spread, the Pentagon began pressing up cheaper acetates in-house rather than risk shuttling them throughout Manhattan by limousine. Upon completion, the records were transported via armored truck to a former girls’ school in Arlington, Virginia, and kept in a safe with the combination entrusted to three officers who were then blindfolded and turned around twenty-five times, thrown in the back of a white van, driven to the next county and dropped off in their underwear with a bag of peanuts and some kite string.
805th Signal Corps Lt. Don Mehl helped monitor vocoder operations in the Pentagon and MacArthur’s base of operations in Manila, where he was photographed here in 1945. According to Mehl, preparations for the Surrender Conference took place at the Manila terminal, the last building standing with air conditioning. (Courtesy Don Mehl and NSA) (illustration credit 2.14)
“Very little about the coding part was allowed to be printed,” says Ralph Miller. “They had a way of taking the sample and randomizing it. The noise power was sampled every twenty milliseconds.” The math itself was driven insane—the vocoder signals were “sampled and quantized to base six.” At the transmission end, the vocoder divided analog frequencies across ten spectral channels, sampling each at fifty times per second. The record noise would be subtracted at the receiving terminal while the vocoder measured the pitch energy (Channel 11) and tried to make sense out of it. “The vocoder added intelligence to pulses,” says Lieutenant Mehl. “The pulses were twenty milliseconds long.”
SIGSALY Guam terminal, code name NEPTUNE, photographed from the rafters. The SIGSALY clock crystals were developed by Bell Labs’ Warren Marrison, a former choir director from Wyoming. One crystal was molded in the shape of a donut. Marrison also enjoyed playing Spin the Bottle. (Courtesy National Archives/NSA) (illustration credit 2.15)
The records had to be random. Had a pattern been detected, the code could’ve been broken and small talk about the president’s Scottish Terrier could’ve been mistaken for a full-scale invasion. Though the randomness of SIGGRUV opposed the nature of Muzak’s ambience and repetition, it assured the codebreaker, that random freak of probability, that noise was noise, just another jamming frequency. “German decoders noticed this strange sound over the radio,” says William Bennett, Jr., whose father worked on SIGSALY. “They were hearing a buzz. But it was really SIGSALY. All the time it was random key noise over a normal shortwave receiver. But they didn’t know what it was. Even if the equipment had been duplicated, the code could not be compromised without SIGGRUV. The only practical vulnerabilities were disloyalty, indiscretion and incompetence.” According to Bennett, another unintended safety feature was that SIGSALY “was so damn complicated nobody else could make it work.”
A test dummy of the last remaining SIGGRUV, photographed at the NSA in 2009. “The acetate records had an aluminum base that could be converted into airplanes,” says Don Mehl of the 805th Signal Corps. The pressings were one-sided as an idiot-proof precaution against “replaying” the code. (illustration credit 2.16)
To the codebreaker, the encrypted signal could’ve been the migraine Moog synth played by James Brown in 1973’s “Blow Your Head,” somewhere between a B-29 with nose plugs and a bee with a sinus infection. Since no one at Bell Labs listened to James Brown in 1944 (the Godfather of Soul was just eleven then, dancing for troops at a Signal Corps base in Fort Gordon, Georgia), SIGSALY was nicknamed the “Green Hornet,” after the popular radio serial that used “Flight of the Bumblebee” as its theme, swapping masked man for masked voice. (A Tsarist violin freakout, “Flight of the Bumblebee” was composed by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who did codework with player-piano sheets.) The radio show’s signature buzz came from the theremin (termenvox), invented by Leon Theremin, a master eavesdropper who would later be forced by the KGB to microwave-bug the US embassy in Moscow. Yet while his instrument brought the Green Hornet to the rescue in America, Leon Theremin himself couldn’t hear it, having been imprisoned in Siberia for espionage. The Green Hornet code name was actually a vocoder being called a theremin, unbeknownst to everybody involved—the first and only double-crossing of the two devices. To the operator ferrying the SIGSALY buzz, it could have been the mechanical bees of Dr. Zapparoni, described by the German writer Ernst Jünger as being plugged into their hive like a phone switchboard in his 1957 novel, The Glass Bees.
In a Signal Corps log for the Algiers terminal, somewhere between “Request to marry local French girl” and “An epidemic of bubonic plague has broken out,” it was reported that the Destruction Machine was yet to arrive. The Destruction Machine ensured that the SIGGRUV would never be played again. Some called it the “Record Chopper.”
The Pentagon originally tried using a furnace, but the vinyl released gasses that attacked the SIGSALY equipment. When the chopper jammed, officers resorted to gasoline or an o
ven. The SIGGRUV instructions read: “The used project record should be cut up and placed in an oven and reduced to a plastic ‘biscuit’ of Vinylite.” If none of these methods was available, they simply gouged the world’s rarest records with a screwdriver and “scratched all over them.” As a final precaution, the turntables were equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, a thermite process used in bomb design. Activated by the last man out, it essentially melted the turntables into an abstract blob. Officers grabbed whatever records they could, or just threw them in the oven with the crystals, leaving the world’s most accurate clock to fend for itself.
SIGSALY modular speech synth cabinets in Guam, circa 1945. (Courtesy National Archives/NSA) (illustration credit 2.17)
Have you said anything to the Russians yet?
— Churchill to Truman, on the vocoder, April 25, 1945
COLD WIND MADNESS
The Destruction Machine ate well in 1945. On April 25, the day after a SIGSALY terminal was installed in a seized Luftwaffe base in Frankfurt, Churchill phoned Harry Truman at the Pentagon.
“How glad I am to hear your voice,” said the prime minister, not hearing Truman’s voice, but a mechanical simulacra.
Standing in for the incapacitated Hitler, SS captain Heinrich Himmler had offered a surrender proposal. Would it be possible for Germany to capitulate to the United States and Great Britain in the West, yet still continue fighting the Russians in the East? Churchill said no, three times. Truman agreed. Himmler would excuse himself from further negotiations by taking a cyanide pill while Stalin began dismantling Berlin and freighting it back to the Soviet Union.
On May 4, British ambassador John G. Winant and the director of European Affairs in Washington used SIGSALY to parse the language of surrender as defined by the Dismemberment Committee. “I thought the amendment to the Surrender Instrument contained the word ‘dismemberment’?”
“We cannot keep it silent any longer,” said a vocoderized Churchill on May 7, before V-E Day. “We must go off!”
Speaking over SIGSALY with Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, Churchill hesitated to include Stalin on the news of surrender. “My chief tells me I cannot act without the approval of Uncle Joe,” Leahy said. “Do you understand, sir?” As if feigning a bad connection, Churchill responded, “My ears are a bit deaf.” The only officer authorized to eavesdrop on the Truman-Churchill call was Dorothy Madsen, a lieutenant who often edited out SIGSALY profanities and transcribed vocoder garbles. According to Madsen, the only words she wrote that day were “cerebral hemorrhage,” referring to Hitler’s health.
Logistics concerning “transmission of bomb programs” had already been discussed over SIGSALY links in Paris, Manila and Guam. As the SIGSALY phones crackled with V-E Day activity on May 8, 1945, the true surrender instrument was nearing completion. That July at the Potsdam Conference, Truman was informed, by whisper, of the atomic bomb test at the Trinity proving grounds in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Over the Washington-Paris link, Manhattan Project foreman Leslie Groves talked about the detonation of nuclear weapons over Japan, hoping to end the war before it ended without him. According to General Barney M. Giles, SIGSALY was used in discussing the logistics of payload to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, a drop of 20,000 tons of TNT was compressed into twenty-millisecond pulses of tactical conversation: “If the second bomb doesn’t work, we’re out of business, because we have no more bombs”—this from a SIGSALY transcript, speaker unknown.
During the Red Army’s pillage of Berlin, Stalin’s NKVD (later the KGB) used a scrambler phone to relay intelligence concerning Hitler’s dental forensics to Moscow, confirming the Führer’s suicide. Evidence of the first Russian vocoder—invented by sampling theorist/radio-engineer Vladimir Kotelnikov in June 1941, two weeks before Russia entered the war—would not be declassified until 1999. Compressing ten speech channels into one, the Kotelnikov Vocoder was devised in a lab in the West Urals, under extreme evacuation conditions, and ultimately constructed in Factory #209 in Leningrad in 1942. During the war, Kotelnikov’s scrambler encrypted radiotelephone connections across Transcaucasia from the front lines to Moscow. In spring 1945, the conditions of Germany’s surrender, from reparations to looting, would be discussed over a NKVD vocoder radio post in Berlin.
Artificial intelligence and misinformation often ruled in the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin’s head of the NKVD, the backstabbing Lavrenti Beria, oversaw the atomic bomb project and the development of a vocoder for secret telephony. (illustration credit 3.1)
The Soviet postwar take-home included Goebbels’ private film collection, women’s lingerie, 250 kilograms of confiscated uranium and the scientists needed to convert the uranium into a fissile isotope. These white-collar POWs would be consigned to gulags called sharashkas, prisons established to help industrialize Russia out of postwar starvation. Physicists and engineers could not be wasted in Siberia, not with the arms race underway. Of particular interest to Moscow was “a US technical journal containing a broad and detailed description of the American vocoder project.” Published by Bell Labs, the journal was filed at the Church of Assuage My Sorrows, a seminary in Marfino, just north of Moscow. Marfino had been converted into a prison acoustics lab in 1947 so that inmates (zeks) could research Secret Telephony. The order from Moscow was clear. Having filled the Kremlin with backstabbers, Stalin, the two-faced dictator, needed a vocoder to guard his phone.
BURNT BY THE SPECS
That guy is the writer of a few banned books.
— Test sentence for vocoder intelligibility, Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, 1971
The vocoder? Ready? Ha! Ha!
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Assuage My Sorrows is now Special Prison No. 1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn stands in the prison yard holding a frozen axe, wearing overalls and a druid’s tree-beard, unaware of the tumor in his stomach. He has spent the day under headphones, breaking the Russian dictionary down into syllables. Some frequencies can be encrypted over the phone, while others are discarded phlegm. This migraine of phonetics and math cannot distract Solzhenitsyn from the fact that he’s designing a vocoder for the Kremlin. At thirty-two years of age, he hopes to be pardoned before the guilt kills him. For now, the best recourse is to rub snow in his face and anoint himself “Director of Articulation.” He starts wailing on a woodpile like it said the wrong thing. In these parts, in this forever of terms, this could be just about anything.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Director of Articulation and author of The First Circle, worked on a vocoder for the Kremlin while imprisoned in a former seminary outside Moscow in 1949. (illustration credit 3.2)
Solzhenitsyn’s fellow inmate Dimitri Panin would describe the semantic perils of the Russian language as a “garbled telegraph signal … a fruitful source of confusion facilitating distortion.” Deciphering double-talk was a survival tool in the Soviet Union, where one’s belief could mean both conviction and indictment. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin, “Leader of All Progressive Humanity,” in a letter to a friend. As it was learned during Stalin’s interoffice purgings in the late Thirties, “comrade” and “friend” had acquired a conflicting list of new definitions, none of which could be trusted, and many of which the Soviet public had not been informed. It’s not that the word hadn’t been getting around; people just never knew when it would get them next. Understanding was in the apprehension, never beyond grasp.
Once a decorated artillery commander for the Red Army, Solzhenitsyn suffered nine years in the gulags before publicly criticizing Stalin’s regime in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, both making the author an international hero and a fugitive in his own country. Published, seized and denounced in 1968, fifteen years after Stalin’s death, The First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s experiences as a zek at Marfino, after Stalin made the vocoder a priority. At one point, Solzhenitsyn slips inside Stalin’s senile brain on his seventieth birthday as the Premo tries to remembe
r two words: “secret telephony.”
Originally assigned to the prison library, Solzhenitsyn, aka The Walrus, would sit in the church’s hexagonal tower under a blue lightbulb, sorting through postwar loot, keeping the confiscated tech manuals separate from the prison’s generous collection of banned Soviet literature. Compared to the conditions at labor camps up north, those at Marfino were relatively humane. There was white bread, BBC radio and volleyball. An intellectual refuge, Marfino was the one place in the Soviet Union where lonely geniuses could safely commit treason, debating politics and religion while developing technologies to be used against their own people. With this absurd association with freedom of speech, the sharashka’s provenance in Soviet slang was “a sinister enterprise based on bluff and deceit.”
According to The First Circle, Stalin wanted a vocoder for his phone almost as badly as he wanted the Bomb for his country. One dehumanizing machine deserved the other, and the vocoder would have suited the dictator who growled in monotone and eavesdropped on the voices in his head, in a country ruled by misinformation, artificial intelligence and denouncements. Paranoia invoked among millions originated with the megalomaniac in charge—if you think everyone’s out to get you, maybe they should be. Something had to protect Stalin’s busy imagination from itself. If anyone needed an artificial speech analyzer, it was this control freak who scrambled reality, whose throat was often robotized by streptococcus, a shrewd neurotic who wanted conversations scrutinized on all levels of the spectrum, in a place where shrill hysteria could be detected in the scratch of a whisper. In Russia, the fundamental pitch was fear.
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